Miliband will bring wholesale deindustrialisation

Thatcher’s coalmine closures “will look like a walk in the park”

Net Zero Watch has said that Labour’s green dogmatism will be a disaster for the working classes, bringing industrial closure on an unprecedented scale. The campaign group, which has warned about the existential threat to British steel industry for more than a decade, says that the Port Talbot closure was inevitable, given the determination of all parties to push up the costs of energy.

The policy of taxing fossil fuels made the closure of Port Talbot inevitable, while the drive for renewables is pushing up electricity prices so far that the plan to replace the blast furnace with an electric-powered arc furnace will almost certainly prove to be a dead duck. [1,2]

And Net Zero Watch director Andrew Montford warns that things may get even worse under a Labour government.

Ed Miliband’s delusions over renewables are going to be a disaster for the UK working classes. He is going to produce deindustrialisation on a scale that is going make the closure of the coalmines under Margaret Thatcher look like a walk in the park.

Mr Montford says that while the finger of blame for Port Talbot should be pointed at the Conservatives, there is an all-party consensus around the policies that produced the disaster:

The Westminster village is so far divorced from the interests of general public that they will shrug off the Port Talbot disaster with barely a look back.

Notes for editors

[1] Electricity prices doubled from 2002—2020, even rising during long periods of falling gas prices, as a result of increasing grid system inefficiency caused by renewables.

[2] Net Zero Watch has been warning for nearly a decade that high energy prices would destroy the sector, starting with energy-intensive industries, and in particular steel. In 2016, Net Zero Watch Director of Energy, Dr John Constable, wrote:

Tata Steel and the energy-intensive sector more broadly can be regarded as a miner’s canary, giving early warning of general economic damage as the costs of climate policies are passed through from energy to all other costs in the economy.